US disregard for truth

The United States has in many regards a laudable history. Among the high points in its development was the establishment of the oldest written constitution in the world, a document that established a vibrant and enduring democracy, while at the same time asserting as sacrosanct freedom of speech, assembly and religion, none which were to be abridged by government.

The United States showed the capacity for self-criticism and the will to change: it corrected some of its more egregious political features, fighting a civil war to eliminate chattel slavery and amending its constitution to extend suffrage to women. More recently, citizens rose up to demand an end to racial segregation and to bring an end to the unjust war the nation’s leaders had embarked on in Vietnam.

For Americans, it is necessary to recall the glories of the past to bring some perspective to the present moment, when there is so much in the administration of President George W. Bush with which an ethical observer can find fault.

Just recently it was revealed that the Republicans in power have shaped scientific research so that its conclusions serve the highest bidder, in this case the petroleum industry and its cohorts. The New York Times reported that the Environmental Protection Agency, which supervises American policy and practice regarding interactions with the natural world, succumbed to political pressure by eliminating the sentence, “Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment,” from its draft report on the current state of the environment.

What is one to call this administrative interference with scientific assessment? Tampering? Censoring? Lying?

Lying might seem a strong term. Unhappily, a central characteristic of the George W. Bush administration is its disrespect and disregard for the truth. If evidence of global warming is uncomfortable to some of the president’s benefactors, then that evidence can be denied, suppressed, censored. If statistics on mass layoffs by American industry make the president’s economic policies seem not only misguided but mistaken, then they need not be collected any longer. (Eliminated last November, those statistics are being collected once again only because the Congress insisted they be reported.)

Is this lying, or only ‘political spin’? After all, on the modern political stage there are spin-meisters everywhere, trying to make sure that facts and events are read in a manner that benefits whoever is paying the spin-meister. Is not, one might ask, President Bush just shaping facts so that they help forward his agenda? Science may be for sale, economic data may be manipulated, but has it not always been so?

It is painful to acknowledge that President Bush is not averse to lying even when, especially when, the most important issues are at stake. If there were any doubt that he has little adherence to the truth, his statements regarding weapons of mass destruction in the six months preceding the war with Iraq answer those doubts.

Although the Bush administration tried out different reasons for attacking Iraq — regime change and bringing democracy to the Iraqi people were among them — the central argument Mr. Bush, Mr. Powell and others advanced was that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and so was a threat to world peace. That argument was forcefully made both domestically, to build American support for a war, and to the United Nations, to secure international backing for acting against Iraq.

On September 12, 2002, President Bush told the United Nations General Assembly “Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons.”

After the war ended, the U.S. set up a 1,400-person search operation to ferret out weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Although 230 suspected sites have already been inspected, no weapons have been discovered.

On October 2, signing the recently-passed resolution authorizing use of military force in Iraq, Mr. Bush told Congressional leaders in Washington, “In defiance of pledges to the U.N., it has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons. It is rebuilding the facilities used to make those weapons.” Neither those weapons nor those facilities have been discovered.

On October 7, he told an audience in Cleveland that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. Surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.” After the war, none of the rebuilt facilities were located.

On November 8, commenting on the UN resolution to compel Iraq’s compliance with UN inspectors, the resolution so strongly sought by the U.S., Mr. Bush said in Washington, “Saddam Hussein cannot hide his weapons of mass destruction from international inspectors without the cooperation of hundreds and thousands of Iraqis — those who work in the weapons programme and those who are responsible for concealing the weapons.” Before, during and after the war, none of those hundreds and thousands of Iraqis stepped forward, almost certainly because there was little or nothing to step forward about. On January 28, 2003 in his mandatory “State of the Union” address to the American Congress, Mr. Bush said, “Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands. U.S. intelligence indicates that Saddam Hussein had upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The sarin, mustard and VX have not been found. Only a handful of delivery vehicles, not 30,000, have ever been uncovered.

As for the British claim, we should examine it directly, especially as Mr. Blair appears to share his trans-Atlantic colleague’s disrespect for truth.

On January 14 Prime Minister Tony Blair proclaimed to an emergency session of the House of Commons that, “Today we published a 50-page dossier detailing the history of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programme, its breach of U.N. resolutions and current attempts to rebuild that illegal programme.

“Saddam has been trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Africa, though we do not know whether he has been successful.” Since then, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has denied Mr. Blair’s claim that they were provided “a number of sources” documenting Iraqi procurement of African uranium for weapon productions, saying the only evidence that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was contained in forged documents.

Mr. Blair made claims similar to those Mr. Bush was making about chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Interestingly, he too appears to believe in sanitizing records. Though his speech to the Commons was widely reported, it is strangely absent from the list of ministerial speeches on the official 10 Downing Street web site.

Perhaps it is missing because that speech about the intelligence dossier also contained the following claims: “Saddam Hussein’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programme is not an historic left-over from 1998. His weapons of mass destruction programme is active, detailed and growing. This dossier is based on the work of the British Joint Intelligence Committee. It is extensive, detailed and authoritative. It concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”

As for Mr. Bush, he was nowhere near finished with his calculated misstatements, continuing to hype the dangers in order to mobilize the American people behind his desire for military intervention. After all, there was a war he was determined to fight. On February 8, during a radio address to the American nation he said, “The Iraqi regime has acquired and tested the means to deliver weapons of mass destruction. We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.” No chemical weapons were, in actual fact, used in the Iraq war.

On March 6, Mr. Bush told a press conference, “Iraqi operatives continue to hide biological and chemical agents to avoid detection by inspectors. In some cases, these materials have been moved to different locations every 12 to 24 hours, or placed in vehicles that are in residential neighbourhoods.” Now that 1400 American and allied inspectors are on the ground in Iraq, and have easy access to residential neighborhoods, they still cannot find those weapons

On March 27, two days before declaring war, President Bush made a televised address to the American people. He gave President Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq, justifying this ultimatum by saying, “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Those weapons have not been found, and likely do not exist.

All through the period when Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were citing intelligence sources on Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and Dr. Mohamed El-Baradei, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, kept stating that no proof of such weapons had been found.

But as with scientific reports on global warming, if the facts do not say what those in power want them to say, the current wisdom in Washington advises excising the facts and substituting others.

In the previous administration partisan Republicans made much of the fact, even to the point of impeachment, that Mr. Clinton was less than truthful in talking about his private sexual affairs. During the current administration, when Republicans control both houses of the U.S. Congress, there is no legislative outcry at all about a president who leads a nation into war on the basis of untruthful claims, or who sanitizes scientific results so that his corporate friends will not be obliged to safeguard the planet’s well-being.

So, unhappily, the strategy of spinning, censoring and outright lying continues unabated. Truth, for those who rule Washington in these days, is an outdated concept.

Huck Gutman is Professor of English at the University of Vermont [USA].

Standing up to terrorism

HOW does the democratic government in India fight the terrorists who are financed, armed and encouraged from outside to outdo the barbarity they have committed earlier? The answer is: In the way which upholds the values that democracies stand for.

It is an easy thing to say but a difficult thing to do. It is walking a tightrope. For years Kashmir, the north-east and several other parts of the country have faced the killing of the innocent and the demolition of all that is decent. The bomb blasts in Mumbai only underscores the point.

Still there is no other way except the one which upholds the law and stays within the precincts of democracy. Terrorists would like our country to snuff out the norms of a free society. Take, for example, the idea of different communities, with different value systems and religions, living together in amity. The methods of terrorists are a constant challenge to our values and our commitment to pluralism.

They attacked the Gujarati-majority areas, apparently to avenge the killings in Gujarat. But they failed in their intent. Despite fundamentalists, the communities are beginning to appreciate the gains of living in harmony. In fact, for the first time in many years, the Hindu and Muslim divide disappeared after the bomb blasts. Muslims from their localities rushed to rescue Hindus from one of the places of blasts, near the temple. Here the terrorists — three men and one woman — had put powerful bombs in the boot of a taxi which blew and smashed everything around to smithereens, killing and injuring scores of people. Muslims rushed the injured to the nearby hospitals.

Ordinary people became heroes. Kadir Ghare, a car park attendant, had noticed some school children alighting from a bus earlier. He ran and took them to safety. His colleague, Ismail Attarwala, had seen the 1993 blasts. This time when he saw how scared people were, he tried to give them courage and confidence. And he was successful. For many people were able to take the blasts in their stride.

In contrast, the voluble Pramod Mahajan, the BJP’s secretary-general, ranted on a TV network that the president should take over the administration of Maharashtra. This was his prescription to overcome the hatred that the terrorists spread. Instead of appealing to his party-led government at the centre for stepping up the fight against terrorism, he made a political speech to exploit the situation. His associates in the Shiv Sena were not far behind.

I cannot understand why Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani’s visit to Mumbai was announced when the blasts were not even one hour old and when the TV networks were showing hospitals and the injured. He is mistaken if he thinks that his presence evokes confidence. People still remember his ‘rath yatra’ which left in its wake a trail of blood and communal hatred in the north Indian states.

Congress President Sonia Gandhi also flew to Mumbai lest it should be said that she was not there at the hour of need. The state government had to put in extra efforts for her security. She probably thought it was worth her while to stand by her party’s government.

Advani, more than Mahajan, should realize that president’s rule does not change things in any way. The same policemen of the same thana take up the case as has happened in the blast case. The same security apparatus comes into the picture. The same intelligence men try to find out why they did not come to know about the plot beforehand, and where they went wrong.

Yes, one change does take place. The New Delhi-appointed governor assumes the charge of the administration. The people’s representatives are ousted under the pretext that the constitutional machinery has failed. The BJP and the Shiv Sena, demanding the imposition of President’s rule, must have had that point in view.

Maharashtra governor Fazal was a BJP member. He was first appointed the governor of Goa where the BJP tried to form its government despite being in a minority. If such a thinking was at the back of the demand for president’s rule in Maharashtra, it would be a crude, undemocratic method to have BJP’s rule in the state.

The problem the country faces is bigger than the charges traded by the BJP with the Congress. It is how to deal with terrorism which is spreading in India and taking a parochial shape. America has complicated the process by occupying Iraq on the one hand and standing openly with Israel against the Palestinians on the other. The killings by the Hamas are murders of the worst type. But what Israel is doing to avenge them is not a lesser crime.

India is being sucked into what the West considers a war against militant Islam.

Nearer home, Islamabad has condemned the Mumbai blasts. Yet, it would have gone down well if it had initiated fresh action against the Lashkar-i-Taiba, the suspect, which has its headquarters in Pakistan. The Jamaat-i-Islami condemned violence when some of us met its representatives at Karachi in June. They should speak out against the killing of the innocent at Mumbai if they had not done so already. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, head of the six religious parties (MMA), who had left a lot of goodwill in India, should have been the first to criticize the Lashkar. His representative has in fact criticized New Delhi.

Terrorism is now a fact of life. We have to live with it. And we have to think of ways to eliminate it. This cannot be done by accommodating differences, nor by the centre taking over the state where it rears its head. The BJP has a penchant for president’s rule. After having appointed the RSS-BJP men as governors, practically in all states, the first thing that the party thinks of is the imposition of president’s rule after any incident because that allows the governor to run the administration.

The same formula is being suggested for the UP imbroglio. That the BJP will sit in the opposition is understandable because it does not have the number. In any case, it came to power through questionable methods. But to suggest president’s rule when Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav can prove his majority on the floor of the house is to throw all norms to the wind.

In fact, when the history of the past few years of Uttar Pradesh politics is written, the BJP would be held responsible for flouting every rule, with the help of the Speaker, to stay in power. The BJP has broken every democratic norm. It has ruined the state politically, economically and socially.

Here is a party which speaks of values. Some were taken in by its pious slogans. But power is all that it requires. By shutting eyes to corruption and criminalization which Mayawati, who became chief minister with the BJP’s help, was indulging in the party has set a precedent which will be difficult to efface.

Power is no answer to the problems that the country faces. But the BJP seems to believe in the theory of gaining power by hook or by crook. — and sustaining it through dubious ways.

The writer is a freelance columnist based in New Delhi.

From bug to drug

AT first glance, a breakthrough in the creation of a vaccine against the Ebola virus might not seem to be of enormous relevance to Americans. Ebola is terrifying: It dissolves the body’s internal organs and leaves victims oozing blood.

Yet Ebola kills its victims so quickly that it has rarely spread outside of central Africa, where more than 1,000 people have died from the disease since it was first diagnosed in 1976.

Nevertheless, the announcement last week that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases have developed a vaccine that protects monkeys from Ebola, after a single injection, has broad significance, both for its potential to help Africans and because it has enormous implications for the U.S. government’s nascent programme to combat bioterrorism along with other new infectious diseases.

This is true, first of all, because even if Ebola doesn’t exist in the United States now, it could in the future — perhaps in weaponized form. Ken Alibek, a defector who worked in the Soviet bioweapons laboratories, has long claimed that the Soviet Union was researching ways to combine properties of the Ebola virus with the smallpox virus to create a deadlier, faster-spreading plague.

Considering the speed with which viruses now move around the world — the SARS epidemic being the latest evidence — Ebola could also arrive here naturally, via a human or even an animal carrier.

Some believe that the technology used to create the Ebola vaccine also could be a model for vaccines against other viruses. Scientists and public health workers who think about bioterrorism are rarely unanimous about everything.

But they concur that a major component of new research has to be not merely the creation of specific vaccines but the development of sophisticated genetic engineering techniques that will help scientists move “from bug to drug” — from the discovery of a virus to the discovery of a vaccine or a cure — far more quickly.

The Ebola vaccine was made by inserting Ebola genes into an ordinary respiratory virus, the kind that can cause common cold symptoms. Using the same technique, NIAID is trying to develop vaccines for SARS as well as HIV-AIDS.—The Washington Post

Towards ‘peace’ journalism

THE place was Taiping, the city of long lasting peace, a sleepy town in north-eastern Malaysia, and the occasion was a four-day peace workshop organized by the Singapore-based Asian Media Information & Communication Centre and Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. The participants included mostly journalists, peace activists and academics from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, the US, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan.

We were all required to put our heads together and study the prospects of conflict resolution in our respective regions and to deliberate on the contents of a draft manual for peace journalism — as against war journalism that journalists have mastered over the last century.

The draft peace manual, the culminating high point of the workshop, was eventually withdrawn for reconsideration after this participant raised a number of objections. The mainstay of the objections pertained to the fact that the learnings forming the basis of the manual were limited to what sounded like academic assumptions drawn by western scholars based on their reading of the history of conflicts in the West.

The manual also did not address the gap between war journalism, in whose development a whole century’s work has gone, and peace journalism, which can only be practised realistically after enough has been done to resolve the existing conflicts in Asia. We need a journalistic framework that aims at resolving full-blown insurgencies and inter-state conflicts in Asia — some of which have implications beyond the continent — before we can graduate to practising peace journalism.

In the course of the workshop, it was at once surprising and refreshing to hear the thoughts of some very articulate journalists from Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, who spoke of border disputes, armed insurgencies, human rights violations and matters related to civil society in their respective countries.

Two academics, Dr Crispin Maslog and Dr Steve Rendahl of South Dakota State University, USA, conducted the proceedings of the workshop. The participants minced no words about assigning blame to their own countries and governments, where it was due, without falling victim to misguided nationalist feelings.

In comparison, the participants from India and Pakistan followed their traditional course when it came to discussing the Kashmir conflict. There was, as expected, an Indian version and a Pakistani version of what’s going on in Kashmir. Sticking to our guns, we kept charging and firing volleys, much like the soldiers manning the guns and pounding the Line of Control for 55 long and noisy years.

But, in the end, there was no deadlock; we agreed that the forgotten party to the conflict, the Kashmiri people, have been unjustly left to suffer their fate as India and Pakistan bicker over the disputed territory. This needs to be corrected. The media can play its role by highlighting the miseries of the people, Muslims, Hindu Pundits and other victims of the conflict, who have been most affected by the ongoing insurgency in the Valley since 1989.

The Indian media have an advantage here. The participants from both countries felt that with a little honesty on the media’s part, they can present a much more holistic picture of the conflict for at least two very good reasons. First, the Valley is accessible to the Indian media and, second, they can help by bringing to light the plight of the Kashmiri Muslims as well as the Pundits displaced from the valley and the Sikhs of Jammu, who have all suffered, in varying degrees, because of the conflict. A reporting based on objectivity could cover all the parties’ points of view, thus strengthening rather than weakening Indian secularism.

‘Why, then, is that holistic approach missing from the Indian media?’ you asked your Indian counterparts, who said that even though that was the right approach to take, it remained a daring one. They said that public perceptions of the conflict were coloured by New Delhi’s consistent refrain that Pakistan alone was to blame for what was going on in Kashmir. That was a fair response.

But then the discussion led to a more staple, nationalistic, approach: the old argument that “India needs a Muslim-majority Kashmir to reinforce its polity’s secular credentials whereas Pakistan needs Kashmir to reinforce the two-nation theory,” Sourav Mukherjee of The Times of India and Uma Vishnu of The Hindustan Times were unanimous in their conclusion.

Leaving aside the assumptions inherent in the argument for a moment, this line of reasoning drowns the very human dimensions of the conflict. Kashmir is not only a territory, it is also a land inhabited by people. India and the Indians, by very implications of this argument, want to keep Kashmir without having to deal with the Kashmiris; a similar argument forms the basis of the Zionist ideology in Palestine.

A simplistic reading of the two-nation theory is also troublesome. There are many in Pakistan who would argue that the theory died one day before Pakistan came into being: remember Jinnah’s address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on August 13, 1947? “...Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, but in the political sense as equal citizens of the State of Pakistan...”

That integration, to a large extent, has taken place despite all the discriminatory laws that were framed by Ziaul Haq. While Sindh’s upper-caste Hindus left for India at partition, a majority of the low-caste Hindus stayed back, who have now become custodians of Hindu auqaf properties, places that they were not even allowed to enter. Today there are engineers, doctors, insurance experts and real estate managers that are to be found among the since then educated post-Partition generation of Karachi’s 200,000-strong Hindu community. There are no Hindu ghettos in Pakistan; one cannot say the same about Muslims living in a BJP-ruled India today, as confirmed by the Indian participants.

Where we, in Pakistan, have failed to safeguard minorities’ rights, and such failures are many, the state has continued to face harsh criticism from the independent press and a number of very vocal rights groups. Inter-faith relations in Pakistan are not as holy a cow as they are in India, where the state’s overwhelming ideology of secularism shuns all debate on the issue, shoving it under the carpet.

This brings to mind a very interesting argument back in 1991-92 that Ashish Nandi, the social scientist heading the Centre for Strategic Studies, New Delhi, had put forth in the course of a Track-II exchange. Sitting in his Delhi office, he recommended that his Indian colleagues follow a salad-bowl approach to Indian secularism as against a melting-pot approach. Once the salad-bowl model was accepted, in which each ingredient retained its individual character and remained part of the greater salad, the Indians would no more need the rationale of Kashmir as a showcase credential of Indian secularism, mistakenly modelled on the melting-pot approach.

The other interesting thing Mr Nandi had said was that India did not need Nehru’s or the Congress’ brand of secularism but the variety that was practised by Mughal emperor Akbar and later by Gandhi. They both stuck to their own faiths and practised them in public life but were very tolerant of all other faiths too.

The two arguments, unfortunately, did not draw much attention back then and were drowned in the din of the proceedings of the informal dialogue, where the other extreme opinion was represented by the late veteran hawkish journalist Girilal Jain. On a subsequent visit to Lahore, the latter had gone around the city meeting Shia clerics and asking them what India could do for the Shias of Pakistan as an answer to what Pakistan was doing in Kashmir.

Narrating this episode to Sourav and Uma in Taiping, the three of us had a good laugh. Then we sat back and realized that none of us present at the peace workshop was a Kashmiri. The thought of inviting a Kashmiri journalist to the workshop had not crossed the minds of the organizers, much like most Indians and Pakistanis who would argue over Kashmir for hours without giving much thought to the fate of the people who live in that sordid paradise.

The road to peace in South Asia may be a long one and full of pitfalls. It is time Pakistan and India, 56 years down the bumpy road, realized that they are not the only parties travelling this bad road in the opposite directions. The Kashmiris, who have been left stranded on this dangerous road, need some sympathy and not just the crossfire in which they have been unwittingly caught.

An unending succession

A FEW weeks ago, when the ailing president of Azerbaijan arranged to have power transferred to his son, a U.S. State Department spokesman was asked for comment.

You might think that a pro-democracy administration would have some choice words for an authoritarian regime preparing to become the first hereditary fiefdom among post-Soviet republics. But the spokesman proclaimed the handoff “fully consistent with the Azerbaijani constitution” and had nothing more to say.—The Washington Post